Use Nagios to monitor for Dell systems warranty expirations

May. 26 2009

You know that here at E.S. we're big fans of monitoring. Today I saw on a mailing list a post by Erinn Looney-Triggs who wrote a module for Nagios that uses dmidecode to gather a Dell's serial number then uses their web API to determine if it is near the end of the warantee period. I think that's an excellent way to prevent what can be a nasty surprise.

There's a pretty serious bug in this script that's easily fixed. The days_left variable is a string, and the warning and critical thresholds are integers. This causes the result to be falsely OK. I'm a perl guy, and know very little Python, but this works for me. On line 98, insert this line:
days_left = int(days_left)

You can test this bug by setting the -w flag to a high number of days.

The use of the Nagios plugins with some shell scripting magic opens up many many many options to check against. At first I used basic installs then I began getting record logs from nagios to push data into ganglia and those graphs have been addicting as I now want to graph just about anything.. I guess the next question becomes how much CPU power/resources will one be willing to give up in order to monitor anything that software can monitor like nagios or ganglia, or any other software with similar measurement or alert capabilities.